Will Scozzafava protest vote sink Hoffman in New York’s 23rd district?
(Fox News calls the race for Bill Owens)
Bill Owens, the unlikely Democratic Congressional candidate from New York’s 23rd district, is looking good going into late hours of voting. The Watertown Daily Tribune is reporting that with a large amount of the vote counted, Owens is beating Conservative Party candidate by about 2,500 votes. But here’s what gets me from their report:
Dede Scozzafava, a Republican who dropped out of the race Saturday, has 6,982 votes.
Scozzfava, the state Republican-picked party, has a vote count that is greater than the gap between Hoffman and Owens. If that lead holds, a message was just sent to the conservative Republican putsch that ousted Scozzafava by the mild-mannered Republicans of New York’s 23rd district: STAY OUT OF THE NORTH COUNTRY.
It’s worth bearing in mind that since Scozzafava stepped out of the campaign and endorsed Bill Owens, national Republicans have been piling on Scozzafava heavily. See Rush Limbaugh’s ‘bestiality’ joke, which Hoffman laughed off when confronted with it. In hindsight, we may realize that it was one of the nicer things said by a national conservative leader about Scozzafava, given all the declarations that she was traitor and so on.
I think a lot of North Country Republicans are saying they don’t care for Bill Owens, but they sure weren’t going to vote for Hoffman after the national Republican political establishment grabbed every brush they could find in order to tar their girl Dede as a disloyal partisan. Even if Hoffman ends up pulling it out, a sizable percentage of the districts’ Republican voters sent a voluble message that they won’t be mau-mau’d into supporting a candidate who is so far away from Rep. John McHugh who just left them. If Hoffman moves hard to the right as a Congressman, he will have a tough time winning re-election in 2010.
Watch in the days ahead for a lot of conservative pundits trying their best to back away from their declarations that NY-23 was going to be a bellwether for the future of the GOP. It is, and it shows that in purplish Republican districts, running into the dark red is dangerous territory.
Watch this space, that vote keeps getting updated, quickly.
***
That’s all she wrote – with 87% of the vote counted, Fox News calls it for Bill Owens. A rough night for Democrats, but the Tea Party movement just got smashed in New York’s 23rd district. It will be hard for him to win re-election in 2010, but if they run another Dough Hoffman, and Sarah Palin can’t keep her mouth shut, he’s got a shot.
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[...] interesting spin…a house divided? Michael Roston – Newsbroke – Will Scozzafava protest vote sink Hoffman in New York’s 23r… Bill Owens, the unlikely Democratic Congressional candidate from New York’s 23rd district, [...]
1) Scozzafava did not endore Hoffman. She endorsed Bill Owens.
2) Doug Hoffman entered the race a month ago, and is giving Owens a run for his money. Hardly a feat that can be undone by the 5% that voted for Scozzafava.
3) Scozzafava’s name is still on the ballot. It’s not as if people were writing her name in, just to stick it to the conservative.
4) Limbaugh did not make a joke involving beastiality. R.I.N.O. is a Limbaugh-created acronym meaning: Republicans In Name Only. His comment was regarding Scozzafav’s endorsement of the Democrat, over the Conservative, in NY23.
This is pretty typical of what I’ve come to expect from a certain brand of conservatives these days. Limbaugh says something that is nakedly disgusting, and you say that it’s not nakedly disgusting. He said that Scozzafava is screwing RINOs all over the country, and compared it to bestiality. It was over the top. Remember Ronald Reagan’s 11th Amendment? The failure of most of the conservative movement to abide by it drove Scozzafava into Owens’s arms. Newt Gingrich was right – she would have voted with the GOP on most meat and potatoes Republican issues in Congress (i.e. taxes), and her heresies would have been as tolerable as Ron Paul’s or Walter Jones’s. Instead, the Club for Growth gave her the stinkeye, and brought the Palins and Pawlentys over with them, and it gave a lot of 23rd District independents, and more than a few mainline Republicans, a bad taste in their mouths.
I think if Owens runs a principled campaign for 2010, develops a brand that’s separate from from the Pelosi left, raises enough money, and faces Hoffman again, he will hold this seat for a long time. If the state GOP does the sensible thing *again* and runs someone who isn’t too far off from John McHugh, they can have this district back.
Anyway, thank you for catching my Hoffman error – it was late and I had been working all day.
In response to another comment. See in context »correction: wikipedia has RINO attributed to someone named Celeste Greig not Limbaugh.
[...] it clear Crist was its candidate when he first announced and now is jumping on the Rubio bandwagon, just as it did last year in the New York House race with Doug Hoffman (abandoning their own party’s nominee in the process) If I’m Susan Collins or Olympia [...]